Forget the $1 trillion coin. How about a $1 trillion gift card?

Every few years the U.S. government tries to get Americans interested in using a $1 coin.

The $1 coin, it is argued, will save billions of dollars because it will last much longer than its flimsy paper counterpart.

And so the coins are authorized, sometimes given a politically correct design, happily distributed throughout the Federal Reserve System, and left to sit in the vaults, or be returned to Washington.

Since the early 1970s the U.S. government has tried and failed four times. From the Eisenhower dollar, to the Susan B. Anthony dollar, to the Sacagawea dollar, to the latest failed presidential dollars, each has flopped as a general circulation replacement for the paper dollar.

At the conclusion of the U.S. fiscal year in Sept. 2011, “Federal Reserve Banks held nearly 1.4 billion surplus dollar coins in their vaults – enough to meet current levels of circulating demand for more than a decade,” Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Neal S. Wolin wrote in a statement explaining the decision.

In their own small way of course, the coins appear to be serving a similar role to that anticipated by proponents of the $1 trillion coin. But backers of that workaround to the debt ceiling debate might want to bear in mind Wolin’s conclusion:

“Minting $1 coins that ultimately end up sitting in Federal Reserve Bank vaults – and serve no useful purpose for businesses, financial institutions, and consumers – is simply not a prudent use of taxpayer resources.”

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